Staple Foods: Reversing The Upsetting Importation!

A steering committee meeting of the Viva Logone Project which held in Yaounde recently once again highlighted a vexing time immemorial problem in the country which is yet to find a definite solution. That of importing to feed the population even where potentials exist to produce in huge quantities and sell surpluses to ready markets within and without Africa.
A balance sheet of the Viva Logone Project presented at the recent Yaounde conclave shows that the lives of some 30,000 rice farmers have been impacted. They have reportedly benefited from compensation vouchers for economic losses and agricultural subsidies as well as purchase vouchers for rice farmers in the irrigated areas of the Yagoua Rice Expansion and Modernisation Corporation (Semry). As good as these achievements sound, the project which targets developing investments in the Logone Valley, like similar ones elsewhere in the country’s rice production basins, is far from bridging the rice demand and supply shortfall that seems to be surging. The population growth and rice needs, far surpass the paltry local output!
In fact, statistics, highlighted during the steering committee meeting, show that local rice production in the country stands at barely 200,000 metric tons while demand is said to be in the neighbourhood of 600,000 tons. A gap of over 400,000 tons therefore needs to be filled.
As such, imports are the last resort. The National Institute of Statistics states that Cameroon imported 652,565 tons of rice for a total of FCFA162.5 billion during the first 10 months of 2022 alone. Economists and other analysts can therefore imagine what this represents to an economy that aspires to attain a middle-income status in just a decade from now. Government’s efforts to solve the nagging problem of incessantly spending huge sums of scarce resources to import rice are seen through the multiplicity of projects, some of which are jointly managed with development partners. But the raging supply gap vis-à-vis demand is clear proof that there is still a missing link. Industrial production is more than imperative here.
The malaise that has caught rice is not leaving fish, milk and other staple food items indifferent. It is said that local production of fish stands at 230,000 metric tons against national demand estimated at 450,000 tons. A gap of 220,000 tons needs to be filled to meet current demand, which is even bound to grow over time with the evolution in population. 
When one imagines that Cameroonians, like most of the human population across the world, live on one or more of the following staple foods: cereals (rice, wheat, maize, millet, and sorghum), roots and tubers (potatoes, cassava, yams and taro), and animal products such as meat, milk, eggs, cheese and fish, their laclustre local production poses a serious problem. Dependency on a foreign nation to feed the local population has serious economic, health and even security threats on the country. There is need to change the wild narrative. 
In fact, there is an absolute need to break the importation chain that is rather dragging on for too long. This passes through a robust plan to step up agro-pastoral production in quality and quantity. A plan denser than spontaneous support of hoes, machetes and wheelbarrows given to farmers which can at best maintain their production at subsistence levels. 
Government is seemingly quite aware of this. That the February 2019 Cabinet meeting which held at the Star Building gave room for the Ministers of Agriculture and his colleague of Livestock to present short, medium and long-term plans to step up local production so as to curtail imports, is testament to this. Going by a press release that sanctioned the February 28, 2019 government conclave: “Government intends to reorganise the structures in charge of fish production, train farmers on techniques of aqua-culture and encourage private sector investment.” Meanwhile, as concerns agriculture and rice production in particular, “Obstacles include, the lack of improved seed, absence of tools for mechanised farming and peeling of paddy rice; the absence of farm-to-market roads also poses a great obstacle as well as the high cost of fertilizers. As remedy, government is advocating the purchase of pouching equipment and increasing the availability of irrigated land.”
How well the proposed solutions have worked remains to be answered. But the fact that the importation of these staple foods has not abated tells the story better. There is more to the plan, provided it e...